5 star ratings

Re: 5 star ratings

I has a problem with a very bad review by a customer on Yell, it was not even a customer I’d been to. I had no recollection of an angry customer who said in the review I had not turned up on the day and broke later appointments and left a mess behind me after I finely called. I contacted Yell to get the details and they point blank refused to give me any information, apart from telling me and area, as in what county the customer lived. I asked them to remove it as I had no idea who or what it as about. They said we will not remove a comment just because it is negative. I pointed out that to my knowledge I had not had any problems. A month later their rep came calling, renewal time, so suddenly you get treated nicely. Told him about it and told him that was the last advert on Yell. Never went back to Yell after that. We all get the odd unhappy customer over the years it is the nature of the business, but an unfair review can wreck your good name. Yell are rather stupid their attitude stinks, until you are ready to spend more money.

Re: 5 star ratings

Lawrence wrote:I wonder if you can buy reviews or testimonials ?

Yes. You can.

K.

Re: 5 star ratings

There seems to be several categories of this.

The first one is a business or website owner that simple slips into an alter-ego and posts up any old stuff, yyou will see them on screen as the likes of “David & Jan said, thanks for a great job” or similar with no substance at all. Completely useless fluff.

Then there’s the paid for ones from mainly low labour cost countries. Patchy English, usually easily enough spotted and often very “spammy”. These are cheap and some people use it for link building, brand awareness and so on as it’s so cheap. They don’t consider that it can make them look like spammers.

You then have the “professional amateur” writers that get paid in goods or money to write up reviews, even if they have never seen or used the company or owned the product being reviewed. You can get these all over the place but the current flavour of the age is fivver.com, you can see loads of them here:

http://www.fiverr.com/categories/writin … uto&page=1

Then there’s the pukka professional ones and they’re a lot harder to spot as, it’s someone with a brain that’s done it who has actually thought out what they are doing and know what they’re doing. These are more expensive.

Add to that all the “we’ll make you social media brilliant” brigade who, for a fee, will get a buzz (they say) around your brand, it’s become a part of general PR more or less these days. It used to be specialised but, not so much these days.

They pollute Facebook, Google+, Twitter and so on as well as forums with garbage on all sorts of things. Some you’ll spot, many you won’t.

K.

Re: 5 star ratings

PS

what ever happened to 0800 media team , i seem to recall they had writers etc doing blogs on the 0800 site and their facebook site .

are they still on the go , i haven’t heard much of 0800 or their media campaign of late , got to admit the photo george had with the 0800 guy giving him the finger was legendary , i can just imagine the 0800 media team sitting all nice and smug having just blogged every bad post on the facebook to oblivion then that pops up

Re: 5 star ratings

yeh thats the problem if your not trained to respond in the correct manner you can end up looking like a right plonker – just falling into the customers trap .

we need a voice of reason , a calming influence , candles and soothing aromatherapy oils ,

or maybe just send gregor round to kick their door in ..lol

i know im poking fun at whats slowly becoming another hurdle in our already decreasing market place ,

personally i think WTA could come up with something , or someone should look into a company that could help small indies when the occasion arises.

its the age old scenario that you dont need it until you need it